Monday, June 27, 2011

sailing to bogense

we were horribly late because we ended up getting stuck in rush hour traffic around copenhagen. but our danish hosts, grethe and knud, who had invited us to sail up the lille baelt (little sound) with them and spend the night in bogense before heading to juelsminde, were gracious and unconcerned about our tardy arrival and the fact that we wouldn't get to bogense until around 9:30 that night. of course, at this time of year, it doesn't really ever get totally dark in scandinavia so night time cruises are, in fact, perpetual twilight cruises.

due to a complete lack of wind, our evening sail turned into a motoring expedition. curious dolphins and seals popped up near the boat. the sky formed a monochromatic backdrop for us, a smooth sheet of deep gray dipping into the sea and blocking out the horizon line, a scene in which we floated by a flat, solid gray canvas world surrounding our watery stage on all sides.

instead of the busy bogense marina, we tied up alongside the actual village of bogense which jutted out on two narrow slices of peninsula on both sides of the canal-like inlet where our hosts would spend the night on their boat. it was so nice to turn off the motor and hear the water lapping against the side of the 38-foot s/s mary. there were only a few other boats tied up opposite ours and except for a small party at one restaurant, no people were to be seen.

the lovely little danish village consisted of a mixture of newer and older small, two-story buildings, the newer ones in a style i call danish modern, oftentimes with dramatic roofline angles, a sea of long windows and, of course, my favorite red-tiled european roofs. running down the middle of each thin strip of land was a row of houses with grass all around and a sliver of a road on one side. that's all. definitely my cup of tea.

{strib lighthouse enroute to bogense}

knud told us that in order to live in the village a business must occupy the first floor of your house. i was surprised by this since bogense looked very much like a sleepy little hamlet of private homes when, in fact, each ground floor held a shop, restaurant, tiny hotel, or bed and breakfast. (we stayed at friendly lund's, where our room faced seaward and we could open the door, walk across the grass and go for a dip in the ocean, had the weather been warmer.)

i realized they maintained the cozy feeling of the place by displaying only small, unobtrusive signs on the buildings (indeed so small that i didn't even notice them at first). and of course this was a neighborhood filled with families going about their daily routines. in addition, the one road on each side was narrow and the parking areas were really just extensions of driveways, very small by american standards; obviously most of the traffic in bogense was by boat.

there is an emptiness on a page, a vacuum represented and magnified by the whiteness of the space.....and i begin to mess it up, get it dirty, to bring it into contact with the world in which it exists, to pollute it with laughter, injustice, loss, ambiguity, laundry, and any other thing that goes into the human experience of life. -evie shockley

the clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness. -john muir

each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint -philip roth, american pastoral

this grand show is eternal. it is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. -john muir